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As I found many times, Perl is awesome until you encounter someone else's Perl. I inherited a Perl CGI and MySQL monster back in 2002 from a Perl monk who unfo

by csmuk 13y ago

As I found many times, Perl is awesome until you encounter someone else's Perl. I inherited a Perl CGI and MySQL monster back in 2002 from a Perl monk who unfortunately died. It was a horrific Cthulu-inspired sprawling demon from hell. Little did I know, this is the norm until my third wave of inherited Perl a few years later. Larger things now push me to Python and I get enough mileage on the smaller things out of the shell and sed/grep/awk. If I want fast stuff, it's a speedup module for Python in C. I think back fondly of it but I know at the same time it hurt me.

fuzzix 13y ago
> "As I found many times, Perl is awesome until you encounter someone else's Perl." I was once that "someone else" - I once left a many-thousand line script behind me which consisted of hundreds of undocumented (and very similar in many cases) regexes and not one instance of the word 'sub'. "It just sort of grew like that", "I was young, a novice!" I tell myself, but still jerk awake in a cold sweat from time to time after fevered dreams of 30 levels of conditional nesting. My last gig where I took over for "someone else", a fairly new system which still managed to have "legacy issues", I understood the gravity of my crime. I tried to atone by crafting concise, readable nuggets for my successor but I am still haunted. I met the chap who took over from me recently. Regarding my "someone else" he asked: "How did you maintain your sanity?" "I didn't". He also complimented the parts I left behind, but I still have those restless nights. "Someone else"'s worst crimes were committed using Ruby on Rails, but the Perl system was constrained by an existing, strongly defined framework. With absolute freedom, there's no telling what damage "someone else" may have wrought.
mst 13y ago
Oddly, the most horrific Cthulu-inspired sprawling demon from hell I've ever inherited was actually written in python. I guess a sufficient level of disinterest in maintainability can defeat any language designer's hopes for the future.

by csmuk 13y ago

fuzzix 13y ago

> "As I found many times, Perl is awesome until you encounter someone else's Perl." I was once that "someone else" - I once left a many-thousand line script behind me which consisted of hundreds of undocumented (and very similar in many cases) regexes and not one instance of the word 'sub'. "It just sort of grew like that", "I was young, a novice!" I tell myself, but still jerk awake in a cold sweat from time to time after fevered dreams of 30 levels of conditional nesting. My last gig where I took over for "someone else", a fairly new system which still managed to have "legacy issues", I understood the gravity of my crime. I tried to atone by crafting concise, readable nuggets for my successor but I am still haunted. I met the chap who took over from me recently. Regarding my "someone else" he asked: "How did you maintain your sanity?" "I didn't". He also complimented the parts I left behind, but I still have those restless nights. "Someone else"'s worst crimes were committed using Ruby on Rails, but the Perl system was constrained by an existing, strongly defined framework. With absolute freedom, there's no telling what damage "someone else" may have wrought.

mst 13y ago

Oddly, the most horrific Cthulu-inspired sprawling demon from hell I've ever inherited was actually written in python. I guess a sufficient level of disinterest in maintainability can defeat any language designer's hopes for the future.